Chapter 165: The Perils of Standards

There are a couple of articles in this month’s Atlantic that consider the way America measures how successfully it educates its young, and these have gotten me thinking about how we measure success for writers.

In one, David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, takes aim at the Ivy League. He does so with a sledge hammer. The Ivys, he argues, have replaced the old inbred elitism of pre-World War Two America (read: rich white boys who’d graduated from Groton or Exeter and follow the old man and granddad to Harvard, Yale and Princeton – HYP, as they are collectively known – where they did not do much of anything for four years before heading off to Wall Street or the State Department) with what was supposed to be a meritocracy that rewarded book smarts above all else.

Except, he argues, the new order has ended up rewarding the children of the wealthy who themselves attended the HYP schools and who as a result could afford to send their children to the schools most likely to place them in the best light of those same admissions directors.

Around and around, creating a new kind of elite which has bred a standardization in measuring what success looks like: add to Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the dream of…consultancy!!

In the second, Helen Lewis, an Atlantic staff writer, takes on education at an earlier age, specifically how young children are taught to read and write. This has been a matter of heated debate for seemingly forever, and in the latest round of contention the focus has turned to the teaching philosophy spearheaded by Lucy Calkins, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia. Calkins devised and championed a curriculum – and created a generation of teaching acolytes – that approached reading and writing from the perspective of allowing young children to discover the joy in words, both those they read and those they write.

Calkins and her philosophy are now being pummeled and in many school districts across the country abandoned in favor of a return to what is often characterized as “the science of reading.” Meaning, an emphasis on phonics – an approach grounded in the belief that before children can learn to love reading and writing they need to be able to perform the rudimentary task of breaking the code of letters and words by sounding them out.

As Lewis points out, all good teachers understand that they have at their disposal any number of techniques to teach, and the best teachers use them all, regardless of which philosophy they favor. (My mother, who taught first grade until she was 78 and was the greatest teacher I have ever seen, knew and admired Calkins, and believed in her approach. She also understood how useful a tool phonics could be, as does Calkins.)

Taken together the two articles pose a larger question, one that extends to teaching students who already possess the skills, talent and desire to write: in the end, what does success mean, and how do we measure it?

In early childhood education it means using standardized tests – administered with ever greater frequency; teachers talk of feeling that all they do is test prep – to assess whether children are reading at “grade level,” and by extension whether a school as a whole is succeeding or failing as determined by the number of students who are performing as expected in reading and math. This matters. It matters because if children cannot possess a basic command of written words their futures will be limited when they compete with classmates who can.

But then again if children see reading as little more than a skill to master on the way to mastering another skill that will, in the view of their parents and teachers, move them further along on the conveyor belt to, yes HYP, what is really being achieved? An elite of very good test takers, who have never been encouraged to experience the joy and miracle of words.

These articles will settle very little. Parents still want to see their children succeed, often by society’s standards. Drawing on Brooks’ argument, I do not envision a time when my BA from Brooklyn College is valued as much as a HYP degree. I also imagine that even if someone comes along and builds on Calkins’ work that effort will likely be followed by an angry backlash and calls for more phonics.

That these questions – and battles – persist suggests a desire for both. In the case of young children, parents want their children to be competent readers who can compete successfully and who also love reading. And while those same parents may dream of watching their grown children walk across the graduation stage at Cambridge or New Haven, they may well still delight in seeing their children pick up a book for pleasure and not just because it will be on the final.

In other words, the desires to achieve according to established standards and the desire for something more compete. The problem for “more” is that unlike standards it cannot readily be assessed and measured. Which means that in the end, standardization rules. Which, I’ve come to believe, can be a terrible thing for emerging writers.

I have watched for decades as eager young writers – I do not say aspiring; they are already writers – come to my school and quickly forget how good they are. This is not a reflection upon my colleagues, who are wonderful, generous and committed teachers. Rather, it says something more about how we, as a craft and culture – journalism, narrative nonfiction – measure success.

Like legacy admissions, these standards are passed along from generation to generation with such unquestioning relentlessness that it is difficult if not impossible to consider that what we now regard as the best approaches to telling stories was not always as it is today.

For many years in my introductory reporting class I’d read aloud from stories written decades, even centuries ago that had been collected in the portentous sounding “A Treasury of Great Reporting” that I found collecting dust in a used book shop and bought for $6.

Here, for example, is the lede of a French reporter’s 1815 account of the Battle of Waterloo in The Times of London: “It was a dreadful night. The rain fell in torrents and most oppressive to the troops, bivouacked as they were in the midst of mire, and not having any time to construct any temporary shelter.”

I can hear a city editor 100 years later screaming, “are we gonna learn any news here about Napoleon?”

Or consider this account of a celebrated 1907 murder trial in the New York Evening World: “A pale, slim little woman on the witness stand this afternoon laid bare the horrors of a life such as few women have led, in her effort to save Harry Thaw from the electric chair. The woman was his wife. For nearly two hours during the morning session and an equal length of time in the afternoon she traced her history from childhood.”

I doubt that one would survive the copy desk. Three sentences? Sixty three words? This isn’t a goddamn creative writing program!

Tastes change. Writers borrow from those who came before. Okay, steal. Then alter it to make it their own. New ways of telling stories emerge. And before long the ways of the past vanish, and what was once seen as novel and perhaps innovative becomes so widely adapted that it, in turn, becomes the new standard. And as happens with standards they become the yardstick through which success is measured. Even if we are not necessarily sure why.

In 1981, when I got my first assignment from the New York Times Magazine I made a terrible mistake. Rather than write the requisite anecdotal lede and extended nut graf followed by a pithy quote, I tried to go, okay, a little lyrical.

Then I got on the phone with my editor. She was not pleased.

“How long have you been reading this magazine?” she asked, unpleasantly.

I stammered something about since eighth grade.

“Haven’t you noticed that all the stories are written the same way?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied, “but I thought I’d try something different.”
To which she said, “We don’t want something different.”
I revised the story. It was killed anyway. Next time I wrote for them a few years later I adhered to the checklist: anecdotal lede. Nut graf. Pithy quote…I took no pleasure in writing what felt like a magazine version of “Mad Libs.”

But here is what was most troubling about that exchange: how did the standard become the standard? If you went back to the Times Magazine to the 1950s the stories were entirely different. I know this because I have labored through Robert Moses’ tome in that same magazine on the virtues of, as best I recall, alternate side parking.

Yet now my work – and yes I because it was my story – was being measured rigidly by a standard that not long before hadn’t existed. Nor was there any questioning or hesitation. Pass/Fail.

And here we are, forty years later, too often doing much the same thing. We expect stories to read a certain way; when they do not we often react first with discomfort and then, pen or keyboard in hand, by making the changes that will make the story read as we believe it should. In doing so, we valorize what can feel like a rigid approach by telling ourselves we are maintaining standards. It is one thing to insist on accuracy, fairness, and doing the work ethically. It is quite another, however, to extend those standards to arbitrary measures of form, certainly not in an era when we have at our disposal all sorts of data that gives us a sense of what readers want, and how they are responding to our work.

Like editors, readers have expectations: for instance, they do not like feeling lost; they do not mind being drawn into a mystery so long as they feel the steady hand of a guide; they want to have a sense of where they’re being taken, even if the resolution is pages away.

Data analytics tells us a lot about readers that we never knew before. Analytics can tell us how long they spent with a story and even how far they’ve gotten. Analytics has revealed that not all readers will read all stories – a liberating insight that frees us from having to make our stories universally acceptable. We know, despite endless calls for brevity, that people read long stories. They read meandering stories. They read stories that are told in the first person. They read stories that do not begin with an anecdote and are without a nut graf.

I know this because for over ten years as a publisher of original works of narrative nonfiction I have spent many many hours, days and weeks pouring over analytics, sorting out what’s caught on.

For too long I measured success by the page views, by the number of readers a story drew. It is thrilling to see readership soar. But I have come to appreciate that it is just as exciting to see a smaller number of readers spending a lot of time with a story. They’re drawn in. They’re engaged. I like to think they're happy with what we’ve given them.

In return, the readers are, in effect, offering us a marvelous gift: license to envision a new, simpler way of measuring success, one based not on meeting certain criteria before we write, but rather on satisfying one outcome: did people read the story?

Begin there, at the end, and suddenly, as if out of nowhere, all sorts of ways to tell stories appear.

I do not want to say a new standard. But perhaps it is the only one that has ever mattered.

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one student’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture